The present invention relates to an installation for fitting sleeves on products such as bottles, in which the products are fed upright, one behind the other, along a conveyor line and the sleeve is drawn from a sleeve supply by transfer elements disposed above the product.
The invention relates to the field of sleeve fitting installations or sleeve fitting machines corresponding to middle-of-the-range machines, i.e. machines which operate at cycles between those of small machines operating at 25 to 40 cycles per minute and those of large machines operating at between 150 and 700 cycles per minute.
A sleeve fitting machine is effectively one element of a production line, for example a bottling line, the parameters of which and in particular the operating speeds of which are defined. Manufacturers currently make sleeve fitting machines with characteristics which are adapted to various categories of production lines, depending on the throughput rate of these lines.
This results in a multiplicity of machines because the current machines have set characteristics which do not allow them to be adapted to production lines operated at different or very different rates.
Of the machines which currently exist in the medium range, one has an inlet screw enabling the timing to be set for the products to be fitted with sleeves and a set of drawing elements which pick up the sleeves one by one and feed them onto the product as it passes the sleeve fitting station. Converting this machine in order to adapt it to handle products of different shapes is relatively complicated because of the feed screw. In addition, the output of the machine cannot be modified.